Tractor restoration benefits St. Jude’s

Tuesday

Oct 9, 2012 at 10:51 AMOct 9, 2012 at 10:54 AM

Cynthia Grau

A Chenoa youth, who battled childhood cancer, has turned his luck around, giving back to the facility that helped him with his three-year battle.Austin Rhoda, 15, son of Todd and Janni Rhoda and brother to Megan and Daniel Rhoda, all of Chenoa, was diagnosed with Acute Lymphoblastic Leukemia Type T, which is a blood cancer and is one of the most common of childhood cancers.“When it all started, we thought it was a sinus infection. He went through three rounds of medicine and it didn’t clear up. The glands swelled up in his neck. Then we thought he had mono,” said Janni Rhoda. “It went like that for a couple of weeks. We took him back to the doctor and had more blood work done and we ended up in Peoria and they diagnosed him there with leukemia, and they sent us to Memphis.”Austin Rhoda spent three years enduring different types of chemotherapy before going into remission. Since he has been in remission, he has found a new passion for restoring antique tractors. Recently, Trevor Sancken of Pontiac was the winner of a John Deere tractor that Austin Rhoda spent his spring break restoring.“We sold 1,354 raffle tickets, so that converts to $13,540 that we raised for St. Jude’s Children’s Research Hospital, which received 100 percent of the proceeds,” Todd Rhoda said. “We initially started selling tickets in March after we got the tractor done. We’d take the tractor around to community sales, Lexington’s Red Carpet Corridor celebration and a tractor drive in Chatsworth. We were asked to go to Penfield, which is east of Rantoul, by Max Armstrong, an American agriculture broadcaster from Chicago. Max had it on his Facebook and we were treated like royalty while we were there.”“The Associated Press picked up newspaper articles about Austin, which appeared in magazines, like ‘Iowa Farmer,’ ‘Missouri Farmer,’ ‘Wisconsin Farmer.’ They all ran stories about it and we started getting things in our email from California, Maine, Pennsylvania, Texas, Canada, all over the place, asking for raffle tickets,” his mom said.So how did Austin Rhoda stumble across the hobby of restoring tractors?“We have some friends that restore tractors and they show them at the fair and I am always interested to see what they look like, before and after,” he said.They give credit to a family friend, Paul Graves Jr. of Graves Restoration, for assistance with the projects.“We go to his place and he has all the equipment to work with, like the sand blaster and a paint booth. He also has the knowledge on how to fix things if it is broken and what kind of parts are needed. When we go there, we get the short and skinny on how to do things and we don’t have to go through all of it,” his dad said. “Austin does the work. Paul tells him how to do it. We keep the sand blaster full and move parts around, but Austin does the work.”Austin Rhoda said that this was his third tractor that he’s restored and although he favors John Deere, he has worked on other brands. Father and son said it took approximately 57 hours to restore the most recent one.“Of the three, he’s restored two for St. Jude. The first and third were donated, along with parts and Paul’s time, and those were for St. Jude. The second one was one we purchased. We just wanted to have an antique tractor,” his dad said. The young Rhoda, who has gotten a clean bill of health that only requires yearly checkups until he’s 18, says he is planning on doing more restorations.“My latest project was restoring a wagon that belonged to my great-grandpa,” he said.“We’re all about doing it again next year, but we need a little break. It got to be a lot of work, with the tractor and all the correspondence we’d been getting,” his dad said.Austin Rhoda said that this hobby will last long into his future, as he plans on farming like his dad.“I’ll always be around tractors,” he said.